Request to Fulfill Value Stream

Many IT organizations have multiple request catalogs addressing the needs of business users, IT practitioners, or end customers. The R2F Value Stream brings these different request catalogs and consumer personas under a single consumption experience using the Offer Catalog. The R2F Value Stream goal is to provide a blueprint for a unified experience that consistently engages consumers.

The R2F Value Stream represents the consumption engagement model and goes beyond the traditional IT request management for goods and services. It fosters service consumption/fulfillment, knowledge sharing, and collaboration between communities of interest to improve service experience and enable self-service support. The life cycle starts with the consumption experience itself, based on an engagement portal which exposes a variety of opportunities to acquire services, goods, knowledge, and/or support. Requests are captured using an Offer Catalog and fulfilled based on the content from one or more Composition Catalogs made available from internal or external providers.
The Offer Catalog makes it easy for a consumer to engage with and consume services from IT. In order to do so, it is imperative that catalog entries are created from the consumer point of view with provider technology choices and fulfillment complexity abstracted away. The catalog entries available for consumption can be tailored to different personas, roles, or functions using profiling. Catalog items within the Offer Catalog are associated with Subscriptions. A Subscription is a contract specifying a specific right to use a service or consume goods. Individual Subscriptions are governed by overall service contracts and ensure that the service will be charged as agreed.
The Composition Catalog and individual service provider capabilities are used to fulfill Subscription requests captured by the Offer Catalog. The Composition Catalog maintains the link between service components to underlying resources.
The Offer Catalog manages the composition of services from various Composition Catalogs.

Large enterprises often require multiple Composition Catalogs as fulfillments are provided by many internal and external providers.

Some IT organizations have multiple request catalogs to address different consumers and organize goods and services that can be ordered. The capabilities of each catalog can vary and lines between Offer and Composition Catalogs often blur, resulting in less than optimal conditions for the service request and fulfillment experience. The common limitations for enterprises managing a R2F Value Stream include:

• A service consumption experience that provides technology/IT capabilities rather than valued services
• Multiple catalogs required for consumers to view and subscribe to available services
• Too many customer service requests requiring creation of fulfillment incidents or projects
• Lack of service subscription, usage, and chargeback traceability